Edward Pramuk will receive Forum 35's Art Melt Louisiana Art Legend Award during the annual event's preview party Friday, July 18. Pramuk, a painter and mixed-media artist, was recently the subject of an exhibition at the LSU Museum of Art alongside photographs by Herman Leonard.

Pramuk grew up in Ohio but has been based in Baton Rouge since moving to Baton Rouge to teach at LSU for 35 years. He retired as a professor emeritus in 2000. Pramuk has drawn a lifelong inspiration from nature, bodies of water like the Gulf of Mexico and, perhaps most importantly, a love of jazz.

He began listening to musicians like Billie Holliday and Duke Ellington by high school, and the sounds informed the work he began creating even then.

"Painting is a much more fluid kind of thing, where you're not really held to the rigors of sheet music and so on and so forth," Pramuk said in a 2013 interview.